April 17, 2016

Carrie Kahn, NPR

José Ramón Fernández will probably never attend another Communist Party Congress. At 92, he's the oldest delegate to take part in the four-day meeting of Cuba's top communist leaders that convenes on Saturday.

With the island's closed economy slowly opening to the world and relations with the United States warming, you'd think the 92-year-old's attendance at an elite gathering that could determine Cuba's future wouldn't be front page news. But that was one of the few peeks into this year's congress revealed in Cuba's official newspaper Granma. As of Friday morning, no official agenda had been published, no government initiatives revealed, and no public forums held. It was a rare level of opacity even by the standards of the island dictatorship.

"This congress is much more closed than any previous ones," says Omar Everleny, one of Cuba's leading economists. Foreign media outlets, including NPR, were not granted visas to cover the congress, which is expected to offer some clues for the regime's plans for the next decade...